In a Washington Post article titled “IPod Devotees Rocked by Thefts”, staff writer Del Quentin Wilber discusses a new and unexpected form of identity theft — loss of musical expression. Having experienced a similar loss recently, I can sympathize.

My loss was not due to theft, but rather to some nameless careless-ass Apple subcontractor assembly line flunkie in Tennessee (am I bitter? Nah.). My iBook G3 has been plagued with motherboard problems as it passes gracelessly through its middle age (at three years old), and the latest seizure caused the computer to lose touch with its RAM. This meant that I couldn’t back it up on MJ’s G4 using Target Disk, so I made sure to get at least three second opinions as to the likekihood of a hard drive wipe — which Apple techs always duly warn you is a dim but statistically non-irrelevant possibility. All were universally confident that the problem wouldn’t require messing with the hard drive at all.

Note to self: don’t believe Apple techs anymore.

My faithful, hardworking machine came back with not only the hard drive wiped, but no OS. Plus, Technician #316354 didn’t even fix the damn CD-ROM drive either, so I couldn’t boot off the restoration disk. Back to the shop for another round. This time it came back with an OS — 10.2.0, to be precise. So on top of everything we had to spend hours bringing it up-to-date as well as reloading everything.

Gee, thanks for all the hard work, Apple Subcontractors. Next time I’ll just get me a big electromagnet and do it myself.

Long story short: I rebuilt almost all of my work files on MJ’s machine from backups, but my music — a huge chunk of which were painstaking recordings off cassette tapes that I will have to redo — lots of photos, and files I’ve been carrying around for countless generations of computers are irretrievably gone. (Don’t ask about the files on the iPod — you can guess.) On the upside, the old G3 has been reconditioned and is going to MJ’s brother to use in law school and I have a Power Book arriving today on the slow boat from China.

But I know the pain of e-loss (or perhaps iLoss). The long sessions of hunting for, loading, de-duping, and arranging files and folders so that I wouldn’t miss a beat with my clients’ projects were good opportunities for me to meditate on the meaning of attachment and the clinging aggregates. And despite the loss of those things — and they weren’t even “things” in their own right, but virtual copies of things, arranged from digits on a hard drive — I am still here and whole and functioning.

Damn right I’m going through a grieving process, but even in the midst of it I recognize that it is just the dance of separation that the ego must perform. Doesn’t make the feelings any less real, but it doesn’t make them any more real, either. Know what I mean?

Categorised as: Life the Universe and Everything

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